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`` Who Got Rich Off The Student Debt Crisis `` By James B. Steele And Lance Williams Essay

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On the first day of class, the professor showed a graph to illustrate how much wealth has deviated to the right most part of the curve. A question was then raised: what does it take to be in the top ten percent? Most students rushed to get their answers through, but none of them ever thought about their chances of being on the left side of the graph, a graph that depicts inequality of wealth in America. In “Who Got Rich Off The Student Debt Crisis”, James B. Steele and Lance Williams showed how the elites, like former Sallie Mae CEO Albert Lord, used money and lobbying to bring the government and school officials in their favor as they siphoned educational funds and retired like kings, and how it affected millions of lives of small people like Jessie Suren. Ever since it was turned into a semi-private loan service, Sallie Mae used money to lobby its way in order to become an effective profit-generating machine that fed off the student’s monthly payment while the government just watched as the well-intentioned program went down the drain. In the beginning, Federal student loan started off with the intention of providing equal opportunity in the academic world. For that reason, President Johnson (D) signed the Higher Education Act in 1965 that offered guarantees of low interest, leniency on payments, and options when the student cannot afford to pay it back. In the next presidency, President Nixon (R) expanded the educational program to make it a semi-government program
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